'Connecting the Bots': NCSU's 'Book Bot' is part librarian, part robot

If you’re looking for a book in North Carolina State University’s Hunt Library, you don’t need a librarian.

Well, not a human librarian.

Just go online or to a kiosk, enter the title of the book you’re looking for, and let NCSU’s “Book Bot” go to work.

The Book Bot is an automated storage and retrieval system for books that pays no mind to the Dewey Decimal System.

Library specialist Carl Piraneo says the Book Bot sorts books much more efficiently -- by size.

“It groups books together by their size and then the bins that they’re stored in have different heights so then we match books to an appropriate height bin,” Piraneo said.

It’s a striking use of automation. According to Piraneo, only about 20 other library systems in North America use the Book Bot or something like it.

Library users request books online or at a touch screen kiosk.

“Once you request a book you can have it within five minutes,” Piraneo said.

The Book Bot is 50 feet wide by 160 feet long by 50 feet tall and goes 20 feet into the ground below the first floor. But in the library, it actually saves space, taking up one-ninth the space of traditional bookshelves.

“We have over 18,000 bins and currently we have over 1.2 million items stored in those bins,” Piraneo said.

“So by using a system like this we reduce the footprint that the books make in the building, so that allows a lot of other types of spaces in the building, like high tech spaces, multimedia and a lot of things that today’s students need.”

The Book Bot not only accounts for each book, it also helps protect the, Piraneo says.

“Everything that we do for these books is for the preservation of them so they can last for as long as they possibly can.”